


you went back to the ghost

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 21:04:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5600806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At eighteen, Natori Shuuichi plays a game with monsters, and loses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you went back to the ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Filigranka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigranka/gifts).



Under the early shadows of winter, the house at the end of the street hung like a corpse.

Capped by a slanted grey roof, its slats glowed in drab, choking beige. Night had painted its windows, bruised dark every pane; in the stillness, each sill glistened like bone. Inside, bookshelves and chintzy chairs lounged in quiet disrepair. Art slid black across the paper screens, trailing lotuses, towers, the flickering lines of cranes in flight. A tree shivered in the glass; its shadow stirred, swayed, and swallowed the room. Through the fleeting dim, little parties blurred into riots; brave drawn figures seemed to tilt, slinging their spears as six-winged birds dove into water, as mothers and children twined their ink-thin arms around one another and hulking, iron-shouldered beasts laughed at the marvel of despair.

The wind fell; the darkness tumbled with it, leaving only stationary ink in its wake.

Around the low table, the boys knelt like masters: chins held high, hands curved against their pinching knees. These measures did not disguise the shark-eyed look one wore beneath his spectacles and his feathery hair. He had not touched his cup since they'd settled, though the vast horned shape across the table had growled an offer more than once. Each time, instead, he squared his shoulders, thumbed the paper talisman he'd palmed like a scholar marking his page, and glowered across the wood.

It was his turn. Together they sat: two boys and two monsters. Their silence spun into the dust.

His companion canted his black head; his posture, ever precise, held unchanged. Such was his grace that this posed all the curiosity of a question, and none of a boy working a discreet crick from his neck. "Shall I make a suggestion?" Matoba Seiji said.

" _Don't._ "

"Aaa?" In their corner, the ayakashi jostled each other with human arms. They shook themselves until their shaggy tufts bristled and the whites of their eyes shone; their brows gnashed like teeth. "S'young Master Cure-eyed coming to the rescue, does he sense his compatriot's losing, s'the brat conspiring now against us to cheat us of our rightful victory—"

Natori Shuuichi wondered if it would count as cheating to slap a silencing charm over the jaws of an opponent. He wondered if he cared.

"Forgive me the observation," Seiji said, sounding sleekly forgiven already. He tapped the painted rim of his cup; Shuuichi counted its chimes, one, two, three. "Will you listen for a moment? Just think: wasn't a proposal like this one unfairly weighted against you from the start? After all, we came together as exorcists to investigate your house. We had rumors of hooligans playing in the abandoned house, keeping stray children of the neighborhood for hours of riddles and lessons, beating them once they gave a single wrong answer and returning them to their parents' doorsteps. Every part of that gave us a bit more of an idea of what we were heading to face."

" _Hooligans_?" Hooting, the beasts pounded the table, thundering hilarity or fury; blades flashed in their fists.

"Personal rumor is rarely flattering," Seiji said. Though he didn't seem to raise his voice, the noise fell to a rumble beneath it. "But you—neither of you knows anything about us except our trade and our shapes. In a game to guess the names of the other side, isn't that a significant disadvantage?"

The beasts looked at each other, then forward. "And?" the first said.

The second leered. "Children like yourselves shouldn't dance around the point, cure-eyed boy, you wanna surrender instead? Give yourselves up, aa?"

The question had been obnoxious the first time; at the eighth, its ignorance was obscene. Shuuichi twitched, fisting paper. "You—"

A tap sounded through his knuckles. His gaze jerked down—but Seiji hadn't needed to look away to find his hand. "The world's been very unfair to you in this," he told the beasts, all sedate looks and rounded schoolboy vowels. "Wouldn't it be fairer if I took your place? You'll have to give the answers, of course—but I know this boy better than you, after all. He might give himself up just to get things over with. If I lose, you have your permission to eat me. Ah—" he trailed two fingers along brow and temple; light struck the narrow gleam of his eye, and burned. "But spare this side, please. It's already been promised to another set of teeth."

"The guy's a brat," Shuuichi said, louder, pressing up his glasses. It had, after all, been his assignment, referred from the friend of a family friend: _he's a Natori of the oldest kind, you know_. "He's never kept his word to an ayakashi a day in his life. Don't listen to his crap."

But the beasts only roared and cackled. "Cursers and oathbreakers, ho!" Each drum, hanging from a collar, rattled and bounced with their gale of nods. "Regular pair of bad boys, the both of you! But that's fair enough, fair enough. We'll be watching from the sidelines, then. Second this game gets dull, I reckon we'll take you _first_."

Seiji braced against the table to rise, then stopped. His head turned. "May I?" he said.

Shuuichi stared. Time stripped away in heartbeats; his knuckles sharpened beneath the thin light, stark as a steel cuff where they'd closed over Seiji's wrist.

He let go.

The rest came clean as ritual: Seiji's circling to plant himself between the two chuckling beasts; hardly sparing either a look as he turned; the curve of his palm against his torso as he bowed from the waist, all courtesy. "Please be gentle with me, Exorcist-sama." His mouth twisted thin; his lashes swept demurely low. "Now—whose turn was it, again?"

Spite welled in his throat. Shuuichi said, "Mine."

Again, the cocking of his head, the ramrod grace of a princeling. "Is it right to start a new round with a lie?"

Their gazes tangled and held. "You were on my side when it was your turn," Shuuichi said, even-eyed. "That means it's my play now."

"Ah." Seiji ran a thumb along his lip, drew a private smile with the curve. "Fair is fair. Ask away, then."

 _What are you doing?_ The question cracked his jaw, gritted between his teeth. But beasts loomed at either side, nameless and waiting, meshed into the protections of an exorcist's old house and champing at the bit to do its work, clutching weapons in their human fists. The old woman had kept her gifts to her death; in some otherly air, the ayakashi's contracts must be hanging like nettled leashes, stinging and still potent.

No. Its history didn't matter. There was a name for creatures like these, Shuuichi knew: demons which came at the little new year, rattling the doors of every parent, all slashing brows and faces red as paint. A name, but not the ones to banish them.

"Your master was a scholar," Shuuichi said. His eyes slid over the boy before him to the misshapen shadows. "What kinds of ayakashi was she studying at the end?"

The beasts glared; their manes quivered, offended by such ignorance and stark with unforgiving. "What wasn't she studying?" one bellowed. "Umibozu, that priest among fish, who'll rise out of the water and snap your boats in half if you dare say his name on a journey! Namazu, who shakes the earth when it thrashes beneath Kashima's boulder!"

"Isonade," trumpeted the other. It slouched onto the tea table, flexing human muscle and tendons; a great tail rolled behind it like a whip. "Great Isonade, who's had its shadow and hooked tail painted a thousand times but never its true colors once! And not the paltry descendants, either—that's what you get for giving your heart to mere fish. No, our master looked for the big ones in the deeps, the kind you could ride across the ocean without feeling more than a breeze in your hair. We tried to learn to swim for her in the koi pond, but then _somebody_ had to get hungry at midnight like a wayward—"

Its drum thudded as the first beast cuffed it. Above Seiji's unswayed head, they gnashed their fangs at one another, then slouched apart.

"Got your answer, didn't you?" one said. Its jaws jerked; lips stretched with slavering greed along Seiji's ear. " _Ask_ him something, cure-eyed boy."

"By your leave," Seiji said. His wrists tucked behind his back; his eyes creased as if with a shared secret. "Exorcist-sama, then. Is it true that you're moving to the city for your studies?"

If he'd counted on any question from Matoba Seiji, it wasn't that. Shuuichi stared.

The monsters bolted up; their howls swelled between the thin walls, fit to rattle the teacups where they spun circles across the table's dust, noise to bruise and rend. "Eavesdropping and deceit!" they bawled, clapping. "And wrath and wrath again—ho! look at the glare on the infested boy. Oh, it's a rare and terrible pair we've caught today, and a rare lesson we'll teach!"

The taste of iron stung his teeth. Shuuichi said, "You could have asked me before we came."

"Would you have answered me?"

Seiji, he'd learned, wore his ugliness in two faces. There was the face he made during an exorcism: his thin bloodied fingers held steady, his lips just parted, stark-eyed and wondering, all sympathy cored out of him as if with the smallest of knives, leaving only a remote fascination for agony or success. But there was this face, too: the grace of his gestures secreted in shadows, his slant-eyed and gleaming slyness, his child's jaw gone gaunt with plans still coming together. Like an archer with a palm crooked above his brow, sighting the arc of his arrow falling, falling—

"The city university accepted me into their arts program." Memory sparked beneath his skin: the weight of ink and formal paper, his mother's mouth pursing through schooled syllables: _Shuuichi-kun, how very well done_. The lizard skittered, nail to elbow and back again; he shook away its tapping claws. "I don't know if I'm gonna stay with it, but the deal's not that bad. The bigger ayakashi stay pretty quiet around my family compound, anyway—they don't need me to handle those."

"When spirits and ghouls learn their place, it takes them some effort to forget again. Once upon a time, your family's name had such an edge behind it..." Seiji bowed his head; his smile thinned as it curled, sleek as a cat's. "The Natori must be so pleased to have kept its shielding into the present generation."

 _Bait_ , Shuuichi thought. He turned from it. "Where were you," he said, "before your master found you?"

A glance sparked between the ayakashi, but died in the air. "The open forest," one growled, "amid the trees as they withered and fell for miles and miles around! We watched the shrines burning and chased its monks and we laughed!"

 _Dying shrines in a razed wood_. His brows furrowed; Shuuichi knuckled up his glasses, raked at the fringes of his memory for a key, any slight thread. "Give me that answer again. Tell me just where you were."

"All our lives before her, we lived by the seas, infested boy!" They grinned as he bolted straight in his seat; their scowls flushed and brightened, sneering secrets, red as carp, red as luck. "We sank ourselves into the softer sands by the shore—we plucked up tuna as they drowsed heavy in the mornings and swallowed them fresh and whole with the salt!"

"One more time," Shuuichi said, low. " _Right_ before the scholar took your contract, I said."

"From the day we opened our eyes to the day we took our masks, we lived in the hearths!" cried the ayakashi. "We nibbled at logs as they withered to ash and scorch, burned children's hands when they reached for things they shouldn't, crawled under the dishes' shadows to keep them warm!"

His fist slammed against the wood. "They can't all be _true._ "

The ayakashi laughed to hear it. Their churring and snarling swelled, raucous with the echo. At either side, their bodies stretched and roiled, fur quavering with their chorus, too large by any trick of hand or eye to be contained in the house's paper and plaster walls. "But they are, boy, they are," the first beast said.

"That's one question," said the second, "three times asked. We won't make you take three for your turn. But you, cure-eyed boy!" Its knife swung inwards—struck the other's and _dragged_ ; inches from Seiji's bare throat, the scratch of metal rose in a high, thin scream. Their leers sloped closer, brimming with steel and teeth. "You'd best make the next one good, or we'll peel the skin off of half your face so's we can see the color of what we'll be supping on soon!"

Seiji lifted his head, a study of porcelain in a schoolboy's narrow uniform. His fingertips stroked across the lightless wood. "My. What whetted appetites. I'll have to think very carefully, then." His eyes were steady; his smile gleamed like paint. "Ah, that's right. Exorcist-sama—are you leaving the trade?"

"What," Shuuichi said. His knuckles still burned. " _What_ do you—"

"It's my turn, isn't it?" He flicked, like signal and command. "Remember the rules: you have to answer a question to earn your own."

It took care to draw back his fists, leave paper to crinkle and unfurl in his lap. His shoulders flexed; a tiny scuttling raced across his collarbones, claws thudding to match his pulse. "If there's a job I can take while I'm studying, then I'll take that," Shuuichi said, picking at every syllable. "But I'm not going to go into exorcism full-time like the rest."

"Practical of you," Seiji said, all chiding praise, "to be thinking of money so soon. You've come into your responsible side quite early."

 _You're fishing_ , he wanted to say; it was sloppy work, for Seiji. He didn't let himself think of why. "That's not my reason."

"Are you going to tell me?" But it flickered in his eyes—half-answer, Shuuichi thought, and half something that could never take a name. A cloud drifted, filtering the unsteady light; in shadow, his profile became again the Matoba heir's, from the sleek line of his jaw down to the pearled murmur of his tapping along the dusty wood. "Well," Seiji said, never anything less than sedate. "There's always the next round, too."

Hours and hours, the game had dragged on. Thin moonlight dripped between the curtains, stripping every shape down to contrasts: the worn carpets thin as ghosts; nameless ayakashi which loomed like statues; Seiji in his magpie clothing, his harsh, curving mouth unpinned to an almost-tender shape. Flaying bare every hidden thing in him before a pair of monsters.

"Have you ever looked at the rooms of exorcists who aren't in the Matoba clan?" Abruptly Shuuichi ducked his head, smothered the next words with a fist. His glasses drooped and he scowled at the table, hissed slow through his fingers for the imprecision. "Ah, like it matters. The point is: they're not any different from yours. It's half books, half unfinished diagrams, with protection circles painted just where they can't be seen and get questions from regular people. Takuma-san's the best of them, and even his daughter won't eat dinner with him on most days because she doesn't want to hear about a world of monsters all around her. Look an exorcist in the eye and all you'll see is the duty. They know they'll die for it one day, so it's all they reflect. That's what I think."

The lizard perched above his pulse, tattoo-still. Overhead, the ayakashi shifted; the dim air showed their knives withdrawing in a grind of limbs and hard joints. Shuuichi didn't look up, digging every word out from the raw red dark of his throat.

"That's not why I took up the work," he said. "I want to see what else I can do, too. What kind of life I could make for myself."

"What a choice."

The words turned over, echoless and light in their tumbling. Had he ever heard Seiji's kindness before? It was a strange, severing thought. Alien and alienating. "I didn't say I was choosing," Shuuichi said. "There's still one answer left that I haven't found. And I will."

Night stretched between them, a hushed blue deepening. His pulse flickered. Across the grain, Seiji's silhouette gestured in permission: _go on, ask_. But question after question had left him unraveled, bare, no closer to any answer. Trained to burn spirit out of soul, to bottle up the spares, to take his papercuts like the oldest scholars—but not to solve the riddle of beasts who laughed deep as drunks and called him _child_.

He scrubbed at his hair, brief and furious. "Why _children_?" Shuuichi said at last, grimly, helpless. "Ayakashi don't steal human beings for no cause at all. Even if it's just some appetite or loneliness or mistake of identity, there's always something that they're trying to get out of the deal, so—"

"Is that a question, Exorcist-sama?"

A beast breathed over Seiji's shoulder, reeking incense smoke and overboiled tea. "Cure-eyed boy. Not switching sides on us, are you?"

"Oh," Seiji said. As if any word might have crept out of his caging memory while his tongue and teeth stood guard. "Our Exorcist-sama knows whose side I'm on. He won't cooperate with me while we're playing."

If it was a hint, it was too subtle to gauge. There was a look in his tilting mouth, the way his lashes dipped against his cheek, which said that it must be; but Shuuichi had fallen past caring. His bones ached for lamplight, for stillness and pages of a great-grandaunt's crabbed blotching notes, lilting remarks dropping over his shoulder: _she must've borrowed from the Western tradition for that verse—no wonder it never caught on for regular practice. There's a prayer book that they were talking about at the last gathering. Have you looked for it at the bookshop yet?_

He said, "What was your reputation for—why did your master call you into her service?"

The monsters hooted. "That's not the way to get our names, infested boy! No shiki gives its real name to a contract with an exorcist! You'd have to be more powerful than the pair of you put together for a hundred years just to take it! We're new things now, and in her honor we'll never take another name again. You'll never pry us out of her house protections, never guess, never change a thing—"

Walls trembled; their curving inked processions leapt and seemed to retreat across the white. The ayakashi bristled and shuffled, hissing calculations about _property damage_ and _police reports_. It was a moment before Shuuichi understood that he was on his feet—that the wood at his knees was shaking from his fists still.

Only Seiji cocked his head, not a single hair shaken out of place. "Sit down, Exorcist-sama," he said. "It's my turn again."

"We've been here for _half the night._ Hasn't this gone on for long enough?"

The moon was fading from the floor; the shadows were quiet.

"So it has, perhaps," Seiji said at last. "Let's finish it, then." 

He rose, too. A hand flashed in the air, jolted a pang as its nails curled into clavicle and vein. Shuuichi's ears rang with it: the impact and its hush, its pinprickling ice, the lizard's faint shudders where a fingertip seemed to keep it pinned beneath the skin. His gaze struck Seiji's, and held it.

Seiji said, "Do you think an exorcism exists for the ayakashi on your body?"

"If you were going into the sciences, perhaps," he added, eyes lidding as Shuuichi stood mute, rooted into place, "it wouldn't be as much of a problem. People in sciences will see only what their laws haven't disallowed. But ayakashi throughout the ages have loved writers and clayworkers and artist. You aren't running far at all... are you? Are you hoping to meet someone who'll see through you, instead?"

Shuuichi thought.

They weren't real questions—it was one of Seiji's worst habits, that he used conversations where others would have taken up the knife: to saw and scoop at flesh, to lever a rib out of place to the heart beating slow and bare beneath. _Are you hoping to meet someone?_ It cut to the core without quite piercing—too slack a line to keep a baited hook. Matoba honesty at its most incurious and unrefined, fashioned into a performance for monsters. He thought, almost, that he might understand.

_Are you hoping to meet someone else—_

The paper slipped from his grasp, and Shuuichi stumbled to grope for it in the deeper shadows, spitting curses.

Too late he felt the room tilt and hunch around him, heels bracing as the beasts clambered to their feet. "Now, infested boy," said one; its knife gleamed ready. They had known, after all; no exorcist would travel without protections. "That's no way to answer in the lady's house."

It sprang for him across the table—and light boiled out of the dark, a brilliant roar as Seiji slammed an open hand against the sigil he'd drawn in the dust, _guard and bind_ in stark curves around the blown pupil of a crumbling teacup, a command impossible to overwhelm. The ayakashi writhed, shrieking; Shuuichi dodged as it tumbled, heard the crack as it struck the tea table, wood and inhuman bones splintering. A curving leg snapped in the wreckage, flew to a side as the beast rolled to its knees, as its knife jammed in the bare boards and it panted, shuddering and heavy, drawing breaths like blood.

Silence. He'd had his fists set high, three new talismans bristling between his knuckles, before the second could move.

Seiji rose, dusting off debris. A heel spun him to consider his work: the broken table, scattered papers and the beast staggered along the floor. "Unfortunately," he said, "I only said that I'd take your place in the game. I'm afraid I never promised to stand idly by once you attacked my host. Have you guessed their identities yet, Exorcist-sama?"

 _Exorcist_ , Seiji had said. Over and over, as if a real name might unravel from his exhale—as if he hadn't called it dozens of times over the year, _Shuuichi, Shuuichi_ , laughed and hitching and murmured like a lapsing secret with fingers tracing the dip in his spine, his mouth snagging on a bright, careless hook as it tilted close. Even in the game, there were a host of names that he could have chosen. Why the title in a dark house?

What else did a title do but name the purpose?

A scholar, Shuuichi thought, who'd lived in a square little thing at the end of a fading street, painted animals and ink figures who were never alone, kept beasts with faces stiff as masks, who dragged children in for lessons and discipline and never knew why. Creatures who carried memories in their skulls of a thousand early birthplaces, ghosts and kami rising to inhabit two painted frames draped in masks and fur. Mannequins. Puppets. False bodies shaped by the work of men, breathed to beast-like life.

Not monsters, then.

"Yorishiro," he said.

"Just so. One name for two bodies," Seiji said, husky; his voice burned with something agreeably predatory. "You could tell us all about where you'd been before you came to the house because you were everywhere: in ponds, roads, the clouds and ashes alike. The smallest spirits of nature, nothing sentient at all before you were forged together. Your master must have been very powerful in her time. Since she bound you to a higher purpose, it'll take you far longer to vanish." His shoulders shifted, an eyeless silhouette; an elbow rose and flattened as a hand sank into his pocket. "By ordinary means, at least."

He spoke. The incantation reeled from his tongue, spinning silver, steady, flaring beneath the relentless reel of syllables by the time Shuuichi had the space to _think_. One step, two—he jerked forward, seizing Seiji's arm.

"You idiot, this isn't the time to test out a new banishing rite! That's—"

But the ayakashi broke first. Its spine jerked and shuddered, roiling coils as it scrabbled on its claws and paws, _pulled_ across the long floorboards towards the bottle open in Seiji's grasp. Its mask snapped upward. A cry pried open its jaws, hoarse and ululating, weighting the air where it fell, like quicksilver in water. Its breath wisped to threads and grew, winding and _eeling_ into smoke—only to tumble, snapped up by the open jaws of Seiji's bottle as it lay waiting.

The twist of a cork squeaked tight. The room shrank, darkened, and was still.

"Boy," the second beast said. Without its companion, every gasp plodded reedy with strain; its syllables unstitched faster than its thick tongue could spin them. "Boy—what have you done?"

"It's just a simple sealing," Seiji said. A thumb traced the bottle's curve; something like fleshy smoke writhed beneath the glass. "I made a few small adjustments, of course. An ordinary sealing jar's designed to strip away the ayakashi's scent and presence. But that takes such a toll on your materials—hence the way such protections weaken over time unless an exorcist attends to them: no one's found a way yet to feed the loop back so that you can't wear away at it so quickly from the inside. This merely makes your kind easier to carry, and to keep in place for a little while, without making you undetectable to the larger yokai."

Alone in the dark, his smile gleamed: teeth set in a curve above the opaque snarl caught beneath his caging fingers.

"It seemed time to take on a shiki for myself," said Matoba Seiji. "It's traditional to make an offering to hold up your end of the contract, isn't it?"

The beast bolted—but Shuuichi was quicker, unthinking, and they tumbled together. Light snarled—the knife's edge falling—but that was nothing, a jolt that flared shallow along his arm before it burned out. Elsewhere and everywhere, the beast was roaring, high and throbbing—like fires left to devour, like the seas—and it rattled through bones and pulse. Shuuichi _dragged_ : talisman after talisman came bristling between his knuckles. _Silver. Prayer. Mercy._ He cast them spell by spell, loud and louder, gritting his teeth as the ayakashi scrabbled, teeth gnashing close. Papers snarled and shuddered, lashing across the long frame as fangs snapped inches from his jaw, stretching long as chains to wrap limbs to body and fasten down every tuft of fur. Incantations whirled in his skull, and he pushed and pushed at the weight of it, binding power, binding limbs, binding speech—

Around them the walls burned pale as summer. Bulging flesh and fur from paper loops, the beast cried out in a string of syllables, and for a moment Shuuichi felt the surge, a wild longing that broke against him like a tide, ground beneath his bones for something he could not name. _Home, home, home_. The weight sank through his knees, his desperate clawing, deep into his lungs. Shuuichi held his breath.

With a thud, the body collapsed. Its shape shivered heavy against him, then spilled into nothing.

A footfall cracked the quiet, and another. Picking his way across scattered strips and the upended broken table, Seiji leaned over to toe the dust.

Shaking, Shuuichi pushed himself up—looked up to the slim shoulders, his easy stride. "How long," he said.

"What is it?"

"How long've you known their name?"

Seiji knelt—traced a brief whorl through the dust. He hadn't thought before to question the open span of his back—hadn't wondered, even once, how the Matoba heir would deign to sit unarmed between ayakashi in a possessed house. "You saw the resemblance, didn't you? Or did your parents never tell you about the namahage?" The silence hung. Seiji turned his head; his smile stretched. "What a good boy you must have been. The namahage—I suppose it's a little like a dragon. A furred dragon with knives and drums and the arms of a man who comes once a year." 

"Yeah," Shuuichi said, hoarse and dry. "Doesn't help when they were never real."

"Well, what better way to teach your children respect for superstition and good behavior? Adults made them up long ago; even the basest practitioner knows that. Ayakashi carry grudges and loves like anything else that lives, but you told them the truth yourself. A monster who lives only to torment children couldn't exist unless it was set to the task by a human being."

"You'd have to be pretty strong, getting a contract like that to stay binding after death."

"Not strong enough. What a purpose she made them for," Seiji said to the ashen floor. "A grandmother in an empty house, teaching spirits to discipline children..."

Shuuichi shifted—felt the impact twinge through his arm and grimaced. The lizard scuttled towards the thin sticky gash where the knife had caught him; it twitched at the jagged line, like a gate across skin, and scurried away again. "She could've stuck with blunted knives. What kind of kid would survive a stabbing?"

"Are you hurt?" Seiji rose after him; his lilt gleamed with surprise. "You didn't need to step in for me."

But Shuuichi wheeled before they could brush, fell back a step to fill the open door. "What's that matter?" His mouth curved hard and thin. "You wanted to see if I would."

Seiji stopped. "I did," he said, easy in the thin light—as if confession were a ritual, too. He stooped, pinched a crumpled talisman from where Shuuichi had fallen. Long fingers stretched it open by degrees; a thumb ran along the neat inking of the first character. "It was nice, though—and your incantations are getting cleaner. I do like the element here."

Shuuichi watched—couldn't have done anything else. Nails and fingertips in a slow skidding trail, skin all pearl and ink, brushing slow as if down the line of a throat, to clavicle and a parting collar. "Nope." A flick snapped the paper out of Seiji's grasp, and he grinned to see the look that chased it. "Clan secret. Sorry if that's why you tagged along."

Seiji's eyes lidded; they flicked, for a moment, to the bottle still hanging at his thigh. "There's no need for you to worry about that. Ah," he added as Shuuichi pocketed the paper. "That's right—you never answered me. About your mark."

It was only half of the real question—Matoba thrift again. Shuuichi narrowed his eyes, measuring his own: "If it's something nobody sees, does it still really exist?"

"How surprisingly dishonest of you."

"I learned from the best."

It would have been easy to leave it at that, as they had time and again before. But there were words left, words still, and they burned on his tongue like coals. Shuuichi jerked his head.

"Wait," he said, and Seiji stopped again. The spilling light had pooled, brightened; gauzy curtains softened the flick of his brows, the twist to his lip as it caught between sneer and shield. He looked, Shuuichi thought, almost young. "That means you owe me a turn, don't you?"

"Was there anything left to ask?"

He took a step forward. At once, Seiji fell back. The gap hung between them, warped as a filled glass. Rougher, Shuuichi said, "Tell me what I am to you."

Another step, and another, a trail blazed by impulse and muscle memory. "Natori Shuuichi."

"Not that. What are we? You and me. Together."

Their footfalls clacked together across the boards, beat after beat: like an invitation, like its answer. His back struck the wall. Seiji's smile stretched, a demure crease of the lip. "Exorcists," he said, and any other word flickered out as Shuuichi caught his mouth.

It wasn't a kiss—couldn't be, any more than the first rough, jolting tries had been across the months, snatched up behind bookshelves, in corners, at the woods' ragged edges with their palms still red from dust. Just mouth sliding against mouth, all teeth and torn little sighs, pressing him into the chipping paint with the arch of a hand spanning collarbone to shoulder, possession at its most awful and most human. Just fingertips at cheek and jaw to turn him, hold him, keep him in place: every instruction that he'd never taken tattooed into nerve and vein.

They broke from it together, panting, and for a moment Shuuichi blinked into the blackness, bewildered at the night, all time burned out of his skull.

 _Exorcists_ , Seiji had said.

He said, "Just so that we're clear—"

"Have you ever tried to be anything else?"

He didn't have to look at Seiji's face to give his answer. Exorcists hunted portents as doctors might for fevers, unlikely bruising patterns, a stray and wavering heartbeat. He'd seen enough, after all, to know. "This is my limit," Shuuichi said. The game that had stretched too long, and all its questions; the dust smeared into the wood of an abandoned house; the swelling glass, live bait in the Matoba heir's hand. The sound of a shudder wracking the slivered air between them and the taste of his exhale. "This is the last time, isn't it?"

"There was never a first time," Seiji said. His inflection had not wavered. "You're the Natori clan's only representative: unless another gifted child comes into your family, the line goes dormant again with you. There's no alliance to make with a clan that hasn't reawakened. The Matoba clan can take no interest in anything less than a joining of worthwhile forces."

"That wasn't," said Shuuichi, sharper, "what I asked. That's never been what I—we're not _talking_ about the Matoba."

"Aren't we?"

Nothing yielding in the question this time—no secret to excavate from those fine veins, the curling lip, the shadows dripping over Seiji's eye as he turned. The dark had distilled him; even in the fading dim, it was easy to see the foundation that family and ancestral fears had laid for their heir, the bones of what he might yet make of them. A star hung just out of reach, Shuuichi thought—a half-seen jar in long grass, sealed and breathing _easy prey_. No lacquer yet of long years, and not untouchable, not yet—but something not meant for touching, just the same.

All those questions, and not one shot had strayed close to the single one that should have meant anything to a Matoba.

He laughed. The sound swelled—a hook at the back of his throat, a knife to cut through his teeth. Secrets didn't matter now. "Your ancestor contracted with a yokai," Shuuichi said. "You know that part. Do you know the name of the exorcist who caught it before him?"

It took him by degrees: thought, suspicion, control. Seiji drew a short, slow breath. "It wasn't the Natori—"

"No. It wasn't."

Portents, contracts, battles. Exorcists built the bones of their profession on these—but the veins, the meat and marrows of the trade, had always come down to the _stories_. Rumors that ayakashi would drag back to their hills and crannies and shrines, feasting on the details as they rotted and swelled, whispering them where the winds would carry. The world knew that the Matoba clan had kept its debt leashed and waiting, at its heel for generation after generation. It was the only tale they'd ever known.

Seiji slid his wrists behind his back; his head bowed, eyes cast into shadow, all sedately honoring. "Are you going to run from me from now on?"

"What." Shuuichi turned away. The doorknob clicked as he turned it; the wood yielded with hardly a creak. "Is the whole Matoba clan asking me?"

Outside, the hall stretched black and bare under his boots; the iron railing shook beneath his hand as he reached the stairs.

"You're still wearing those glasses," Seiji called after him. "What do you think you'll find, with a view so warped?"

But Shuuichi didn't look back. Here and there, the thin glinting dawn had grown into rays, slanting through the panes. His stride steadied; his wrists swung quiet at his sides. From beneath the house's hush, he crossed the floor alone to open the way out to the cresting empty sun.

A new day, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I liked your prompts a lot and hope that you'll forgive the liberties taken with them. Happy New Year's!


End file.
